Thursday, March 3, 2016

It's been a while since I've had a chance to put some blog posts together (mainly due to focusing all my extra time on a new book project that's soon to be released) and I thought it'd be good to kick off again with a quick post about SCOM network monitoring.

Since SCOM 2012, we've had some pretty cool network monitoring capabilities out-of-the-box where you can easily discover and monitor a wide range of vendor network devices. Basically, any type of network connected device that supports ICMP (Ping) or SNMP can be monitored. As ICMP is only a basic Up/Down identifier that any monitoring tool is capable of performing, we'll skip the discussion on this.

What types of network devices can you monitor?

Using SNMP with SCOM, you can think outside the box a little where, aside from the typical devices you'd associate with network monitoring (switches, routers, firewalls etc.), you can also monitor things like UPS devices, air conditioning units, door scanners, wireless access points, cash registers and even CCTV cameras! It's these extra non-typical devices that people often forget about when deploying a monitoring solution and they can make all the difference when you need to get the full 360 degree view when mapping out IT services as distributed applications.

These types of SNMP devices will be discovered in SCOM as Generic devices and you'll get some basic monitoring capabilities back for them - similar to the Generic SNMP device we're monitoring in this image...

Taking it to the Next Level with Extended Network Monitoring

Extended network monitoring is available for any devices that implement the SNMP management information base (MIB) RFC 2863 and MIB-II RFC 1213 standards.

An extended network monitoring device will give you additional monitoring capabilities for things like Chassis, Processor and Memory components (as shown in the following screenshot):

If your devices support these standards, they will be discovered as Certified devices in SCOM and in the past few days, Microsoft has published an updated Excel spreadsheet containing a list of all network devices that are supported for this extended monitoring capability.

This spreadsheet is an update to one that was released a few years back for SCOM 2012 and it's the official list of network devices that are supported for extended monitoring in SCOM 2016. With nearly 850 different devices on the list, you get information about the Object ID (OID), device type, vendor, model name, and whether or not the processor and memory components get monitored as part of the extended monitoring function.

Here's a screenshot of some of the contents of the updated spreadsheet:

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About Me

I'm a Microsoft MVP in the Cloud and Datacenter Management space and work as a consultant for Ergo based in Dublin, Ireland.

I really enjoy the fact that we are in a constantly evolving industry that requires us to up-skill as much as we can and one that provides us with new products and solutions each year to make the job all the more interesting and ever changing!